Al-Karak

The ridge has been fortified for as long as there have been kingdoms on this plateau. As Qir of Moab it appears in the Hebrew Bible, and the Moabite realm whose king Mesha recorded his wars on the stele found at nearby Dhiban had its strongholds here. Under Rome and Byzantium the town was Charachmoba, a bishopric with churches on the ridge, and it kept a Christian population through the early Islamic centuries.

Its best-known period began in the 1140s, when Pagan the Butler, lord of Oultrejordain for the Kingdom of Jerusalem, built a castle on the spur to control the caravan and pilgrim road between Damascus and Egypt. The fortress took its revenues from that traffic, and under Raynald of Châtillon in the 1170s and 1180s it became notorious for raiding caravans, provoking repeated sieges by Saladin's armies. Karak held out in 1183 and 1184 — one siege famously interrupted by a wedding inside the walls — and fell in 1188, the year after the crusader defeat at Hattin. Ayyubid and then Mamluk rulers rebuilt and extended it, making Karak a regional capital and a state prison for inconvenient princes.

Under the Ottomans the town was a remote district centre, governed largely through its tribes; a revolt against Ottoman taxation and conscription broke out here in 1910 and was put down harshly. In 1880 about ninety Christian families left after tensions with their Muslim neighbours and resettled the ruins of Madaba. Karak passed out of Ottoman hands during the Arab Revolt and became part of the Emirate of Transjordan. In the 20th century it became a governorate capital with schools, hospitals and a university, while the castle, cleared and studied from the 1920s onwards, turned it into a fixture of the King's Highway.

Karak is tribal country, and identity here is expressed through family and lineage more than through the town itself. The large clans of the district — among them the Majali and the Tarawneh, names familiar in Jordanian politics — have supplied ministers, officers and prime ministers, and the town's reputation for producing soldiers and public servants is a matter of local pride. Elders still mediate disputes according to customary law alongside the courts, and weddings, funerals and reconciliations draw hundreds of relatives.

Christians have lived on the ridge continuously since Byzantine times, and Orthodox and Catholic families are part of the old town's fabric, with churches a short walk from mosques. Relations are close, feast days are shared, and it was Karak families who founded the Christian community of Madaba in 1880.

Hospitality is unusually emphatic even by Jordanian standards. A visitor is pressed to drink cardamom coffee, then tea, then to stay for a meal; refusing outright is awkward, and the expected form is to decline politely several times before accepting something small. Mansaf is the ceremonial expression of that hospitality, eaten standing around a shared tray with the right hand, and Karak considers itself the dish's home. Dress is conservative, greetings are long, and the shemagh, the red-and-white headscarf, is worn daily by older men rather than only on occasions.

The town has roughly 30,000 residents, with a few hundred thousand more across Karak Governorate, which stretches from the Dead Sea shore up to the plateau and east towards the desert. Public employment dominates: government offices, schools, the hospital, the security services and the army, along with Mutah University, the large campus south of the town that draws students from across Jordan and gives the district a young population. Farming continues on the plateau — wheat, barley, olives, sheep and goats — and potash and bromine works on the Dead Sea shore below employ many families from the governorate.

Daily life turns on the market streets and the main junction. Bakeries and vegetable stalls open early, shops close for a few hours in the afternoon and reopen into the evening, and men gather over coffee and cards in cafés while women shop and visit. The week ends on Friday with prayers and a long family lunch. Water arrives on a schedule and is stored in rooftop tanks, and the wind on the ridge is a constant in winter.

Karak's problems are those of provincial Jordan: high youth unemployment, graduates leaving for Amman or the Gulf, and an economy dependent on government wages. Tourism brings coaches to the castle but little money into the town, since most groups stop for an hour on the way between Amman and Petra. Many families keep a plot of land and a few sheep alongside salaried work.

Karak's claim to fame is mansaf, and the town treats it as an inheritance rather than a dish. Lamb or mutton is simmered in a sauce made from jameed — hard white balls of dried, fermented sheep's or goat's yoghurt, produced in the villages around the town and considered the country's best — then poured over rice spread on sheets of thin shrak bread, scattered with fried almonds and pine nuts and eaten from a communal tray with the right hand at weddings, funerals, Fridays and for guests.

Beyond it, the plateau's cooking is plain and good: bread baked in wood ovens, labneh and white cheese, olives and oil from the western slopes, and za'atar, the mixture of dried thyme, sesame and sumac, eaten at breakfast with bread and oil or baked into manaqish. Hummus, foul — fava beans stewed with oil, lemon and cumin — and falafel fill the morning cafés. Galayet bandora, tomatoes fried hard with onion and chilli, and mahshi, vegetables stuffed with rice and mince, are the everyday meals, with maqluba, the upside-down rice pot, for larger gatherings.

Sheep and goat products run through everything, from the yoghurt drink laban to the grilled kofta and shish taouk of the market grills. Sweets mean knafeh, cheese pastry in syrup, and trays of baklava at feasts. The drinks are sweet tea with mint or sage in winter, small cups of cardamom-scented Arabic coffee at every meeting, and sometimes coffee flavoured with cinnamon and ginger in the cold months on the ridge.